Brazil Nightclub Blaze Kills More Than 200

SÃO PAULO—A blaze apparently accidentally ignited by performers swept through a crowded nightclub in the small town of Santa Maria in southern Brazil early Sunday, killing at least 232, mainly college students.

A fire swept through a crowded nightclub in Santa Maria, a small town in southern Brazil, claiming at least 232 lives and plunging the nation into mourning. The WSJ's Brazil bureau chief tells us more about Brazil's deadliest fire in decades.

On Saturday night, hundreds of mostly students of agronomy and other subjects at the nearby Federal University of Santa Maria had packed into a nightclub called Kiss to hear a popular group called Gurizada Fandangueira play a raucous version of Brazilian country music that features the accordion. The students were heading back to class at the end of their school break.

Around 2 a.m. Sunday, according to several witnesses who spoke on local radio programs, at least one performer lit what they described as an emergency traffic flareor a piece of firework and waved it around to the beat.

"We were in the middle of the second band, and someone started waving this artifact, doing a show, when someone yelled, "It's catching fire!" " said one female witness who spoke to Radio Estadão.

Members of the band, which promoted its use of pyrotechnics, weren't immediately reachable for comment. At least one member of the band was reportedly killed.

Fire Rips Through Nightclub

Agencia RBS/AFP/Getty Images

The disaster ranks among Brazil's deadliest fires in decades, and plunged the South American nation into mourning. President
Dilma Rousseff,
who launched her political career in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul where the fire took place, cut short her stay at a summit of Latin American and European leaders in Chile to travel to the scene.

"It's a tragedy for all of us. Who needs me now are the people of Brazil and it's there that I need to be," said Ms. Rousseff, who appeared to fight back tears during a brief news conference in Chile before flying to Brazil. Ms. Rousseff visitedwith survivors at a local hospital late Sunday.

An early morning fire killed over 200 people in the Brazilian city of Santa Maria. Local police confirmed that 245 dead and 48 injured at the scene. Note: Video has no sound. Photo: Associated Press.

Images of the aftermath—some recorded on the cellphones of survivors and many unprintably gruesome—brought the awfulness of the scene into sharp relief. In one photograph, the camera peers in through a broken wall on a macabre scene of intertwined bodies, some shirtless, piled together so thickly that the nightclub floor is all but covered. The bodies seem to fill the frame from the foreground all the way to the dark, far recesses of the nightclub.

Earlier

Several shots show mobs of concertgoers outside the nightclub trying to tear metal siding off the club walls in order to open an exit. Another depicts a young screaming man as he runs away from the club, carrying a limp body in his arms.

A rescue worker told reporters there were so many bodies it was hard to reach the back of the club. Cellphones in the pockets of the dead inside the club rang eerily as rescuers searched the venue, officials said.

ENLARGE

A police officer helps a woman next to Kiss nightclub in the Brazilian city of Santa Maria. At least 232 people were killed in a fire at the club.
Reuters

"I saw many people trampled in their desperation to get out," Michele Pereira, a 34-year-old office assistant, told the Folha de S. Paulo newspaper.

The owner of the nightclub couldn't be reached.

The tragedy adds to a chilling list of nightclub disasters that appear to follow an eerily similar script: Fire transforms a crowded nightclub celebration into a terrifying deathtrap, where dozens of youths perish in the smoky chaos of a cramped and darkly lit room, dying either crushed in a stampede or suffocating searching for a way out in the darkness. In the largest of them, 309 died after a fire spread in a nightclub in Luoyang, China, on Christmas Day in 2000.

Improvised pyrotechnic performances inside nightclubs were to blame in at least three other such tragedies, including one that killed 194 in Buenos Aires in 2004 and another that killed 152 in Russia in 2009.

In one of the deadliest nightclub fires in the U.S., a pyrotechnics display during a 2003 performance by the rock band Great White at a Rhode Island nightclub set a blaze that killed 100.

Brazilian officials are expected to investigate key issues that have figured in past blazes such as whether the exits were clearly marked and whether the nightclub had exceeded capacity.

In the heated aftermath of the deaths, there were conflicting reports about whether exits were open. According to some witnesses, security guards tried to prevent people from leaving, thinking they were trying to avoid paying their bill in a country where concertgoers settle up at the end. Other survivors interviewed on the radio said that the exits were unimpeded.

Police said only that the accident was being investigated.

The overnight fire was among the deadliest in Brazil since some 500 died in a fire at a circus near Rio de Janeiro in 1961.

In what passed for good news Sunday, authorities lowered the death toll to 232 after earlier reporting that at least 245 had perished. At least 116 were injured, many from inhaling smoke, and the Brazilian military used helicopters to transport grave cases to hospitals in the state capital Pôrto Alegre.

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